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Inkjet Printed Circuit Boards Answered

Would it be possible to use Bare Paint or any other electrically conductive fluid as a substitute for ink in any inkjet printer. Then printing onto a thin piece of plastic, or even paper, then gluing it to plastic. I have no idea if this would be possible. It was just a random thought I had.

3 Replies

if you can get your hands on a very old, as old as you can possibly find inkjet printer, you might be able to get the paint to flow. you would also want to remove any and all filters in the cartridges head,

It is certainly possible, and was patented over 25 years ago. As Caitlin's Dad said, the difficulty is getting a conductive paint to flow properly to form the micron-sized droplets needed for inkjet printing.

You're not going to be able to make a substitution into an off-the-shelf printer with off-the-shelf conducitve paint. Rather, you would need to engineer either the liquid or the printer head to be optimized for the task. This is not a casual DIY project, but it is certainly something doable by someone with some polymer chemistry or/and electromechanical engineering experience.

Standard ink jet nozzle mechanisms are pretty finicky on the microscopic droplet they pump out. I would imagine the conductive particles in the ink would probably clog the printhead unless something were designed for a thicker ink.